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Innovations as imagined futures in EU sustainability policies

Abstract:

This paper explores the roles of technological innovations in EU sustainability policy and governance discourse. We argue that innovations should be understood as both material and imagined. As material artefacts, innovations may promise solutions to painful trade-offs. As imagined futures, however, innovations provide resources for policymakers to navigate balancing acts between multiple policy objectives. We illustrate with two selected case studies how such promises tend to fail as material artefacts while still being able to ‘cut the Gordian Knot’ of the policy nexus. Thus, innovation acts a policy lubricant and drives nexus governance towards technocratic approaches that displace the aim of material transformation towards sustainability. It strengthens the reliance on experts and technological fixes at the expense of attention to political tensions, disputed values and the diversity of European publics.